This gets to the fundamental question of what is moral. Many people have their own definitions, or traditions handed down for what is moral, but most of these

This gets to the fundamental question of what is moral. Many people have their own definitions, or traditions handed down for what is moral, but most of these codes never even consider PEDs, and yet a lot of people seem to dislike them. For me, morality can almost always be distilled down to trust. If an action makes people in a community more likely to trust others in their community, then it is generally a moral thing. In the case of professional sports, there is an implicit agreement to play fair (or at least on a level playing field.) Obviously, given our understanding of human genetics, this is decidedly an unreal expectation, but our sense of morality hasn't caught up to our understanding of science yet. In this light, Armstrong's major offense is not using PEDs per se, but the fact that he did it secretly while saying something entirely different (very convincingly no less.) How could you ever trust Armstrong's word again? More importantly, the more athletes (and others) are caught getting an advantage we have decided nobody should have, the less we can trust anyone, and sports (to say nothing of business) suffers as a result. That's why Armstrong is a pariah. His actions aren't innately offensive, but they are a threat to the social fabric that lets hundreds of other people ride bicycles and throw balls for a living. It's the same social fabric that lets me trust my mechanic when he says he's fixed my car or trust that my pilot didn't cheat through flight school. Anything that threatens that trust is bound to be viewed as bad by a lot of people even if we can't easily explain why.